IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2014 - 87

FIGuRE 10. Symposium Prize Paper Award recipients Dehong
Liu (left) and Petros T. Boufounos with Society President
Melba Crawford.

for Teaching Excellence, both from the MIT EECS department, and has been an MIT Presidential Fellow. He is also
a senior member of the IEEE and a member of Sigma Xi,
Eta Kappa Nu, and Phi Beta Kappa.
6. IEEE GRSS IntERactIvE
SESSIon PRIzE PaPER awaRd
The GRSS established the Interactive Session Prize Paper
Award to recognize the author(s) who posted at the GRSS
Symposium (IGARSS) an exceptional paper in terms of
content and impact on the GRSS. When selecting the paper,
other factors considered are originality, clarity and timeliness of the paper. The published versions of the papers in
the Digest shall also be evaluated. Prize: Certificate and
$1250, equally divided between the authors.
The 2014 Interactive Session Prize Paper Award is presented to Roberto Sabia, Mattia Marconcini, Thomas Katagis, Diego Fernández Prieto, and Marcos Portabella with
the citation: "For an exceptional paper posted in the Interactive Session of the International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, IGARSS'13 entitled "On the Assessment of
SMOS Salinity Retrieval by Using Support Vector Regression
(SVR)," co-authored by Roberto Sabia, Mattia Marconcini,
Thomas Katagis, Diego Fernández Prieto, and Marcos Portabella, and presented at the 2013 International Geoscience and
Remote Sensing Symposium, July 2013 in Melbourne, Australia,
IGARSS'13 Proceedings."
Roberto Sabia received the M.Sc. degree (cum laude)
in Environmental Sciences, curriculum in Oceanography,
from the Università degli Studi di Napoli "Parthenope",
Naples, Italy, in 2002 and the Ph.D. degree (cum laude)
from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain, in 2008, with a Thesis on the salinity retrieval
within the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission. From 2003 to 2008, he has been with the Remote
Sensing Laboratory, UPC, Barcelona, Spain. In 2006, he
was a Visiting Ph.D. Student with the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, UK. From 2008 to 2010, he
December 2014

ieee Geoscience and remote sensing magazine

FIGuRE 11. Interactive Session Prize Paper Award recipient Mattia

Marconcini with Society President Melba Crawford.
was with the SMOS Barcelona Expert Centre (SMOS-BEC),
Institute of Marine Sciences, Barcelona, Spain. From 2010
to 2013, he was a post-doc Research Fellow at the European Space Agency (ESA-ESRIN), Frascati, Italy, acting
also as Technical Officer and Coordinator of the ESA STSE
"Changing Earth Science Network". Since 2013 he is contractor for Telespazio-Vega UK Ltd. at the European Space
Agency (ESA-ESTEC), Noordwijk, the Netherlands, where
he is acting as data analysis engineer. In 2010, he has led
a European COST Action proposal titled "SMOS Mission
Oceanographic Data Exploitation (SMOS-MODE)", successfully selected for implementation and funded for the
period 2011-2015. He was the recipient ex-aequo of the
best Ph.D. Award in remote sensing of the Spanish Chapter of the IEEE GRSS and the best European Ph.D. Award
(5 awardees) in remote sensing of the IEEE GRSS, both in
2008. He was an invited lecturer on SMOS ocean salinity at
the "ESA EO Summer School on Earth System Monitoring
and Modelling", Frascati, Italy, 2012, and at the COSPAR
Capacity Building course on "Remote Sensing of the Global
Water Circulation to Climate Change", Beijing, China,
2012. He has been co-Editor of the SpringerBriefs series
book "Remote Sensing Advances for Earth System Science-
The ESA Changing Earth Science Network: Projects 2009-
2011", and Topic Editor for the EGU OS/BG inter-journal
special issue on "Earth Observation for Ocean-Atmosphere
Interactions Science". He served as reviewer for TGRS, JGR
and GRSL journals, among others.
Mattia Marconcini received the "Laurea" (B.S.) and the
"Laurea Specialistica" (M.S.) degrees in telecommunication
engineering (summa cum laude) and the Ph.D. in Communication and Information Technologies from the University
of Trento, Italy, in 2002, 2004 and 2008, respectively. From
2004 to 2008 he worked in the Remote Sensing Laboratory, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento. From 2008 to 2012 he
worked at the European Space Agency (Frascati, Rome) in
the Department of Earth Observation Science, Applications
87

http://www.M.Sc

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2014